


Sweetest Taboo

by SkySamuelle



Category: Guiding Light
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst with a Happy Ending, Beauty and the Beast Elements, F/M, First Love, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Smut, Loss of Virginity, Smut, bad boy Jonathan Randall, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:22:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 21,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25313782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkySamuelle/pseuds/SkySamuelle
Summary: Repost of my 2007 fiction: AU where Alfred dies before he did in canon and as a consequence … Jonathan and Tammy meet in very different circumstances, under very different pretenses, in their college years. The relationship that blooms between them is something dark, deep, volatile and yet it brings out hidden depths from both them. Can it survive the eventual discovery of a truth that should, by all means, separate them forever?
Relationships: Tammy Layne Winslow/Jonathan Randall
Kudos: 1





	1. Prologue

As a very famous scientist has said – and many writers have already repeated- time and space are relative. 

Concealed by our eyes, beyond our capacity of recognizing and analyzing its existence, there’s a number infinite of other universes , alternate realities where a single step has made available or desired a path you would n’ t be even able to see otherwise. Where a single thought or wish has created for you another chance, another life – for better or worse. Where a seemingly meaningless event has changed you barely or beyond recognition .

For Jonathan Randall the event which changed it all came when he was barely seventeen year old but if we could ask him, he would probably answer it was already too late .

Because if there was anything he had already learnt to know intimately by seventeen, it was Anger.

It was anger toward himself at first- natural and mournful like the lowest cry of a child who wonders why he can’t get anything right at school, why he can’t stop making those small mistakes that anger Alfred so much. Why he cannot be enough of a son for Marissa, who is just there looking at him with those sad, sad eyes while her husband-his father- punishes him again and again for being so ungrateful. 

It had grown day after day, bruise after bruise, insult after insult. 

It turned soon enough to anger toward his natural parents- his flesh and blood, which had abandoned to that life when he was too young for deserve it. Yet, for long time, it survived inside him a morbid curiosity about Richard and Reva, those strangers whose names Alfred used often as final flap-in-the-face to close a conversation. 

The first time Jonathan felt hate for his adoptive mother, he had heard her coming back to home while  
Alfred was breaking his bones and his pride on the floor of their sitting room. She had hesitated on the threshold for few seconds, then she hurried in kitchen to prepare dinner.   
And Jonathan felt something in deep in his chest exploding and eating him from inside out, stronger than fear and more intense than tears, blinding him to everything, even his father’s violent kicks in the stomach.  
Afterwards, when Marissa came to soothe him inside his room, he shook away her long-fingered hands ( those same hands which used to comb so slowly his hair before school ) with a physically painful defiance. “Go away, Marissa ” 

He still remembers the look on her face after he had said it, his voice - thick with something different than crying, for once- delivering a rejection he would confirm every following day, the surging tide of triumph which had accompanied the realization that he could hurt Marissa just as much her indolent subservience had hurt him. 

Jonathan is sure he has never seen that particular hurt and humiliated expression again until the Alfred’s funeral, six years after.

He sits between his aunt Olivia and Marissa and feels her hand closing hesitantly around his own, while a priest bleats on about forgiveness and other useless platitudes.

Jonathan waits few seconds, letting her to get used to this silent comfort, before pulling away and making a big show of cleaning his hand on his pants.  
He awards with a wolfish grin larger than life the sharp intake of breath coming from his other side, from Olivia.

He doesn’t feel remorse because after all, he’s more the Alfred’s son than Marissa’s. There’s nothing inside this broken, weak woman which he can connect to himself. 

They are never been a real family, and even the illusion is fading fast.  
Nobody loves him and he doesn’t love anybody…. it’s the most addictive kind of freedom. 

Jonathan doesn’t understand how people can actually want it another way, but he swears it will never be his case . 


	2. Chapter 1: An Unfortunate Encounter

**Chapter 1: An Unfortunate Encounter**

The first time Tammy meets JB, she is already short on her breath after running all the way back from the campus to her dorm room, desperately trying to remember where she has possibly left her history notes, frantic about not getting late for the Prof. Andersson‘s lesson.   
So, it’s no wonder if panic temporarily, totally freezes her on her footsteps as she bursts her door open … to find a boy comfortably sprawled on her bed, turning the pages of some booklet with indolent flair. He doesn’t even look up right away, like if his presence here is not anything less than natural .   
But when the stranger does look up, Tammy wishes he has never done it, because while his dark eyes travel lazily over her slim figure, it’s obvious they leave no part of her untouched, examining every part of her anatomy to measure her to whatever standard is on his mind. 

Receiving this kind of blatant attention has always made her to feel dirty, rather than flattered and   
indignation is probably the only force to set her vocal cords in function: 

“ Hm, what- what are you doing there? ” 

Even if they never personally met before, Tammy knows who he is. JB is a sort of ever-present celebrity on the campus, which sounds unusual since he’s not a student, at least until you learn he furnishes Sororities and Fraternities of their share of illicit substances during parties and official celebrations. But if she could have remained ignorant to those significant details- after two years of attending Yale- the chances of washing away from her memory the long, embarrassing hours her dorm mate Amanda spends talking about his questionable character and his questionable sexual proclivities are slim to none.

He sits up on her bed and his shoulders appear broader, his stature taller.

“ I’m waiting for Amanda” – JB grins at her, and it’s so elusively predator-like than it just condensates the tension between them – we have … *a thing* ” 

The way his voice slurs around latest syllables with superficial warmth is deliberately allusive and his gaze stays glued to her face with some inappropriately avid interest.

“She told me”

  
Tammy forces her lips to stretch in something vaguely resembling to a smile.   
Her tongue feels suddenly flat and heavy in the hollow of her mouth and her throat is just so… so dry. This is not fear but still … something makes her uneasy around the older boy. 

Perhaps it’s just a natural consequence of being faced with the reality of his presence after far too many -embarrassingly intimate- conversations with his current lover. 

  
“I’m just going to look for my notes ” she says, fighting an impulse to shake her head. It’s only pathetic that she is enabling him to make her uncomfortable inside *her* dorm room.

“Feel free to do that”

JB comments with more insolence than malice, pleased by the furrowing of her delicate brows in response to his quip

  
. This mere slip of a girl feels actually embarrassed for his lack of embarrassment… it’s almost cute.

He’s remotely tempted to challenge her resolution as she proceeds to ignore him, but studying her while she bends over her desk, rummaging through countless papers, is far more more awarding. The slight stiffness of her back is the only sign of how aware she truly is of his observation.  
Her long blond hair are gold and honey blended together, falling in thick, soft-looking locks before her visage to obscure a delicate profile from his sight.   
The white cashmere scarf loosely draped around her neck and the modest elegance of her pale grey coat convince him that Tammy Layne must be one of *those* upper class girls – spoiled rotten by their money and too sheltered from their families to barely realize their advantage. 

Definitely, she’s not his type of girl.   
Mind you, he wouldn’t chase her away from his bed during a cold night- there’s something of…harmonic and graceful in her silhouette which makes her virginal in a mouth-watering way. 

“ Hey, Princess ”

Tammy’s heart starts hammering against her ribcage with unexpected violence.  
…He can’t to know … 

She turns around with reluctance, her blue eyes suspicious, but JB is still sitting on her bed with the irritating ease of a young man without a care in the world.

When he speaks again his dulcet tones have not lost their cutting edge and his eyes retain a dark, mocking light. 

“You aren’t looking for those, are you ?”

JB’s handing to her the booklet he was reading before she came: her notes were in his hands all along. 

_He is just being a jerk- he has not called me this way because he does know about me ._

“Oh, grow up!” 

The blonde sputters tearing away from her opponent the sought booklet


	3. Chapter 2 : Hidden Princesses and Lost Princes

**Chapter 2 : Hidden Princesses and Lost Princes**

For two years, Tammy Winslow has attended Yale, hiding under the ‘pseudonymous’ Tammy Layne, living with the constant expectance of being found out as the honorary princess of San Cristobal.

Probably it’s because a part of her has always felt guilty about forfeiting, albeit temporarily, the Richard’s adoptive paternity …. Not only she has stepped back to recognize herself as Chris Layne’s natural progeny, but there’s the relief Tammy feels every time she realizes how closer she is to the insecure, plain girl of her childhood than the pristine model of virtue whole Springfield sees. 

Back to home, where the love of the Lewis clan encloses her in a warm, fuzzy safety blanket, everybody see her like this candid character cut out of a fairy tale- even Joey, Lizzie, her own mother.

Tammy is meant to live the life Cassie has never had, and nothing is wrong with that.  
Nonetheless, she has appreciated being just Tammy, with no teary back-story and no imposing, overprotective family stepping out to defend her honour. 

She is reminded of this every time she glances to JB- one week ago he has got her to think he had exposed her and although the misunderstanding was been nothing more than a joke of her overactive imagination, now she cannot stop to stare him from across the room.

Tammy blames it on the boredom.

Tonight, when Amanda has basically dragged her away from her books to infiltrate this party organized by the Lambda Sorority (Jenna, the Amanda’s hyperactive and bitchy sister, is a member of it ) Tammy already suspected it would ended it like this: with her dorm mate danced and drank the hours away while she faded forgotten in the back ground .

The rapacious beat of disco music surrounds her like an invisible, isolating barrier as she sips with distaste her gin tonic; from her corner, she can observe Him with a certain discretion.

JB is handsome- she has not noticed during their first face to face, because his features are so often twisted in a distinctly unpleasant expression …. Which she finds oddly compelling now it isn’t directed to her.   
She has seen him coming in and sitting at that table among all those rich, arrogant daddy’s boys and girls without no embarrassment for his faded jeans and worn leather jacket; he has just to swagger around and crowds part for his passage- one dirty, duplicitous line and people flock to him laughing.   
Even Jenna, with her silk brown Armani dress sits in his lap and inclines her head aside coquettishly, letting her coiffed dark red curls to fall on his shoulder as she leans in toward him, unaware (at least, so Tammy favours to think) of the way his gaze lingers on her leverage. 

Amanda and JB can have an open relationship, but this still seems distasteful. 

Tammy is never been the one to understand the charm behind the bad boy image yet now, staring at JB across the room- the blunt sexual appeal he exudes, even if he’s no model, the malicious , ever present edge of his tight-lipped smirks, his exaggeratedly self-assured gesturing – all what she feels is the sharp bite of Envy. Not for Jenna, or even Amanda but for JB himself.   
She wonders how it would be to feel so easy, so comfortable in her skin. There’s something about the delinquent youth before her eyes which belies every constraint.

Everyone she knows – from her family to almost perfect strangers – keep to paint with their words this amazing portrait of a beautiful, loveable, grade A student but Tammy cannot find herself there… inside, where nobody manages to see, she doesn’t feel like a princess at all.

Deep down, she feels just like a bundle of unresolved, constrained, nameless things- this hesitant little person who let Lizzie Spaulding came between her and Joey, in spite of a certain awareness that he felt for her as much she felt for him. She can hide behind new or old last names and act like if she fits in adequately among these well-bred, poised society girls but it will be always like  
the difference behind looking fine and being okay.

  
JB is the very opposite of all what she’s familiar with : rude, antisocial, criminal and yet utterly uncaring of anyone’s opinion but his own. At least- this is how she imagines him, now that she can sum together the Amanda’s indiscretions, the campus’ little talk and her personal impressions.  
The resulting picture is so vivid in her mind than it feels real, like if she has gotten to know him without noticing. 

This thought makes her to smile as she sees JB gaining an humorous scuffle from Jenna for leering at another girl. By their side, the Campus’s gazette redactor bursts in booming laughter, probably intoxicated. 

“He isn’t so amusing anymore, once you get to know him”

A male voice from her left startles her and her questioning gaze meets a sheepish, dark-haired youth with two half-filled glassed in his hands.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you”

Tammy smiles politely to him, softened by his unease. 

“Oh, it’s not your fault. The music is too loud… I didn’t hear you coming”  
The other boy glances again toward the previous object of her attention, his face sympathetic.

“I’m Sandy. JB is my friend …. We went to school together in Switzerland, you know”

“Switzerland? It must be an amazing country to study in ...”

Although Tammy has more than some difficulty to imagine JB in any sort of academic environment. Seemingly, even the wonders of private schooling won’t save you from becoming a drug seller.

“It’s. Oh, wait- do you want something to drink ? The friend I came with sent me for a glass of punch but I have lost her since awhile…”

The abashed expression on the Sandy’s visage hints to what his words refuse to…Tammy cannot help to think it’s the lamest, graceless way to dump an unwanted accompanier. And although she usually avoids alcoholic beverages during this sort of feast, but this one time accepting is nothing less than a duty. 


	4. Chapter 3 : An Unlikely Saviour

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tammy's good deed risks getting her in very serious trouble and JB rescues her.

There’s only one certainity in going out with tramps- JB has learnt after long experience: put them outside a bedroom and they get boring really fast.

Jenna and Amanda Carmichael could be siamese twins bornt few years apart : they share the same cherry curls ever-stinking of overpriced hair- products, the same artificially soft ivory skin and heart-shaped faces, the same plastic athletic bodies.

Definitely the same irksome habit to give him small pats on his back, arms, shoulders -and basically anywhere their molesting hands could reach for during a public conversation- which he has found entertraining only when they have been trying to suggest him a threesome without appearing like total sluts.

So, with Jenna wriglling in his laps as she spars unoriginal commets to her less than significant friends, he ‘s more disappointed than surprised of complete lack of excitement.

_Really, I must stop to get mixed with ex-cheerleaders and promqueens after business is on the road._

His eyes wander absently around the salon, catching a familiar shape among the crowd: it’s Sandy Foster, holding up a blonde girl. JB lets his attention lingers on the latter- a petite, lithe creature whose figure is distantly known to him. Narrowing his eyes, he recognizes her as the Amanda’s roommate.

His first impulse is looking away- this is not his business after all . 

Yet, in spite of himself, he finds the situation disturbing. He wishes that Sandy would stop picking up girls using his name as leverage... it does make him to feel somewhat responsible for whatever will appen afterwards and it’s just plainly morbid.

  
He has told himself he should quit Sandy and his theatrical antics quite often in past , but every time his resolve ends up faltering. Sandy idolizes him and there’s a sort of dependency in that which keeps the other boy grounded to the JB’s tracks, it doesn’t matter how brusquely he’s treated. 

But this doesn’t mean that JB should feel like intervening in whatever messes his unwanted puppy sets up. 

JB blinks and an image of the Tammy Layne’s angry face dances behiond his eyelids, surprisingly vivid – like a pastel-tinted watercolor of flushed cheeks and expressive cerulean eyes.

  
Amanda has sometimes insinuated she’s a virgin, ready to flush intensely at the each explicit mention of sex, but even without that... Miss Layne looks like a fragile thing, the kind of girl he takes great care to avoid because it’s too easy to crush.

JB shakes off the thought and tries distracting himself, rubbing his face on the Jenna’s pale nape. Then he glances back to Sandy leading ablòondie away.

"Ehi, where are you going?” 

  
He doesn’t bother answering as he roughly pushes the red-head off him.

* * *

Somewhere during her chat with Sandy, Tammy has begun to feel her knees growing weaker and her head lighter.   
Everything around her has softer borders, sharper sounds. Sandy puts his arm around her to sustain her, as she tries to giggle....all what gets past her theeth is a graceless shriek.

Then it comes the silence,the coolness.

  
She quints, getting used to the new lightingand inhales the fresh night air. Someone must have her accompanied outside. Scott? No, the name was something like Randy... Sandy. Yes, this was it.

Anyway, the darkhaired boy still holds her firmly against him, murmuring rushed words she does not strive to understand. She is half-aware of a warm wetness on her throat.

  
Suddenly, there’s a cachophony- a voice cuts the quietness in splinters and its caustic richness ripples troughout her body.

“Be aware , Sandman. I thought you stopped rummaging among my leftovers! ” 

  
The hold around her waist gets swiftly weaker and Tammy is falling ...someone else catches her before she meets the ground. 

“Jon-Jonathan?! I had no idea you knew her”

“So you will have no problem keeping your hands off herin future.This is the Mandy’s roommate ”

“Amanda Carmichael? You are seriously into her now?!”

Sandy sounds incredulous and his visage shows, irritatingly, the usual blend of disapppointment, resignation and eagerness to know and to please. 

JB just grips impatiently the girl’s shoulder, securing her against his larger frame.

Pressed against the hard planes of a male chest, Tammy shivers. A part of her brain is vigilant enough to recognize who this is yet not enough to recall his name. 

  
The remarkable smell of cigarettes of his shirt, laced with faint traces of a femninine perfume (Chanel N5? ) fills her nostrils, arousing a powerful wave of nausea. 

Her empty attempt to put some distance between herself and her rescuer is hjer last concious act before darkness shallowswhole her world.  
\---

The morning after, while Tammy reluctantly, slowly awakes, a persistent sense f disorientation clings to the edges of her consciousness

Sunlight filters from the window, hitting her face offensively but her responding groan of protest dies in her dry mouth. Groggily, she licks her lips and sits up, so slowly than she could be awakening from a thousand years letargy. She’s almost surprised to find herself in her bed, inside her dormroom.  
Why?

Memories of last night rise painfully from the mists of her mind with shocking violence, like snapshots of a forgettable party: Amanda leaving her alone, Amanda dancing and drinking with eager fratboys, JB and Jenna flirting... Sandy. Sandy who had offered a drink before she got sick.

“Oh God”

It’s lucky that surprise is overpowering the disgust, because otherwise right now she could be about crying. 

“Tammy? How are you feeling?”

Amanda stands before her, tall and wrapped in only a white towel- when did she get out the shower? Tammy has not noticed...

“What’s happened to me?” 

  
It’s a wonder her voice can actually sound so broken...inside herself, Tammy can only feel a deafening silence.


	5. CHAPTER 4: Pride and Prejudice

There are situations in life for which no thank-you’s, however articulate or heartfelt, are adequate- Tammy has heard this line before, but without having actually unterstood its true meaning. If there’s one thing in whole the universe she has never seen herself doing, it’s being grateful to the campus resident criminal and most controversial individual.

But now... how do you thank a guy you barely know for stopping a friend of his from raping you? She’s not entirely certain she should thank someone for taking the only decent course of action in a such situation, but then...JB is not a decent person ordinarily and he could have simply turned his head the other way, like many closer acquaintances of hers who had probably witnessed what was about happening.   
So, this matter isn’t simple at all.  
Oh, finding JB is hardly been difficult- he has a peculiar talent for not passing unobserved- but each and every time she manages to locate him, he’s either surrounded by tall and muscular athletes or excited girls with short skirts and naked necklines.  
Yet now she has finally surprised by himself and there would be nothing simpler than sauntering up to him as he smokes, sitting on a bench and appearing moderately harmless- her legs won’t cooperate.

Frozen in place, she keeps on staring him from behind a tree, like if this is some romantic European film- or rather a quite satirical Nipponese comic- but no guiding instinct kicks in.   
She thinks JB smokes the same way he walks- with that

raceless fluidity of movement so proper for animals and so uncommon for men.  
He’s ignoring completely the sketchbook laying on his knees and his poise in sitting is... absent really. He’s more sprawled than sitting.   
Looking at him, she cannot help to feel equally powerful waves of repulsion and attraction.   
It’s this consistency of feeling on her side what gives her back the spine to stride toward him.

Tammy stops few steps away from his bench. His head is turned upward and his eyes are closed like if he’s warming up to the noon’s sun. Probably he doesn’t realize her presence until she greets him: “Hi”

Lazily, JB bends his head aside and favours her again with that vaguely predator-like smirk which puts her so at disease.

“Princess! Anything I can do for you?”

Figures. He speaks and he’s magically already on her bad side in the space of two seconds .

  
“My name is Tammy, use it.”

Her reproach sounds harsher than simply conversational, so she does a calculated effort to correct her tones “I wanted thanking you for what you did for me last night” 

“Oh, get all tense about it… this is a line I hear often, although not n this context”

How is she supposed to play along after lines like those?  
“Can you be serious for at least five minutes?”  
“You are stiff and bothered enough for both of us, Tam-Tam. But go ahead”

Either completely oblivious or uncaring about her discomfort, he flips open the sketchbook on his knees and turns half-interestedly its blank pages. 

“I wasn’t quite myself then but Amanda has told me your friend Sandy was trying to…get advantage of me at the party and you stopped him and helped her to bring me back to the dorm. Probably it sounds as stupid as it feels but I wanted you knew I know I … owe a lot for this. So… well, thank you ” 

“You are *really * polite”

JB’s eyes aren’t faltering from his immaculate paper-sheets and Tammy can literally feel her good disposition toward him evaporating; at least she has said and done all what she meant to, so there’s no reason she can’t get out this embarrassing situation immediately. 

“So if there’s anything I can do, let me-”  
“You can sit there as I sketch you”  
“What?”

However obvious, her shock doesn’t even prompts JB to look up; his hands, suddenly free from any tobacco, are searching his pockets for …a pencil, apparently.  
“Professor Hoffmann is setting up the usual exposition of end-semester and each student of his class needs to consign in a _personal interpretation of a classical myth_ ” –he simulates what is probably supposed to be his professor’ pompous tone- I need a model and you need to satisfy this stifling urge to help me out, so help out!”

Tammy cocks her head aside and studies his indolent expression, trying to decipher whether he’s serious or not. 

  
JB slaps the place beside him on the bench and when she occupies it, he angles himself so he can get enough space for both looking at her closely and moving freely.

“So, do you follow courses …of Art?”   
If the incredulity in her words matches the one in her mind, JB’ s inexistent reaction doesn’t give it away.

“This is a college Tam-Tam. A prestigious institution. Even my own mother requires an excuse to pay me rent- he pauses, meeting her gaze with transparent amusement- What did you think I’m here for? ”

So he did notice. Tammy opens her mouth to formulate some flimsy excuse, but nothing inspires and seemingly there’s no necessity of adding anything else because JB starts laughing raucously 

“Let go, I think I got it”

  
And even if it’s terrifically embarrassing his laughter is so contagious than Tammy can’t help a bashful smile in return, as it washes slowly along her spine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mmh, I recalled there was a scene where Jon made a vignette of the Reva's imaginary grave... I took my inspiration from there and I made him an art student. At the very least, he got the right temperament....


	6. CHAPTER 5: Every you and Every me

Tammy has to acknowledge it: dealing with JB is much simpler and more pleasant when he’s silent and all what she has to do is staying put allowing him to draw her. Yet, now she knows she’s entitled to not cultivate any conversation, she’s strangely tempted.

Her companion is scribbling on his paper sheets furiously, with almost maniacal energy.

“You have to be good if you are in the Hoffmann ‘s class”

JB’ s answer is less than enthusiastic: “This makes up for a decent hobby and as I’ve said, I need a valid motivation for mixing with you pureblood scholars. My mother’s father attended there”

“You make us to come across like a very breezy breed of horses” 

JB smiles and, Tammy is sure, anything he’s about saying will be the opposite of nice.

“I can prove you, Princess, that horses have an higher IQ than the most of Daddy’s buffoons here.”

“Like your rapist friend, you mean?”

  
Her sarcasm distracts him from his work, finally- all in once he is no longer tracing nervous, probably too approximative lines, but snapping soundly shut his album and looking in her eyes aggressively.

“Firstly, sweetheart, I won’t call Sandy Foster my friend. He’s more of… a pet, if you must define it-”

  
“Oh please, he follows you around all the time and he hardly do anything to stop it!”

  
“”So? It’s entertaining to watch: I say jump, he only asks how high, I kick him and he come backs for more licking my feet!”  
“Do you honestly think it ‘s _fun_? ”

Her indignation leaves him so unmoved than Tammy wonders for few seconds whether she’s the one exaggerating, right until he drawls: 

“Well, I’ve always used to ask for a feisty puppy for Christmas but- ”

“So perhaps the next party, you could keep his feisty attentions all for yourself! ” 

She splutters, so completely bewildered and angry than she’s barely out of breath. JB has the grace of not replying… at fist. 

“For what’s worth, I doubt he meant to get through with it. He would have not brought you outside if he had meant raping you. Too many people around. Probably he just wanted get some action without the constant terror of your rejection. ”

_This is simply unreal…_

“You gonna say he never had bad intentions?!”

JB smirks unpleasantly- is that the only expression he ‘s able of?- and raises his hands in mock surrender:

“Oh, Sandy does not do _bad intent_ , he just has a ton of issues with females, families, personality…and for the record, I’m not defending him, I thought this could make you to feel safer. I don’t care if you turn him in. He’s a loser! ”

“Fine”  
Tammy adds frostily, with enough finality to signal the undisputable end of the argument.

They should both know she couldn’t, regardless of how frustrating it could be, turning in Sandy.

There was a too long history of similar cases dissolved into nothing but a lot of unwanted attention.   
Besides, her family worried enough about her as it was.

Luckily, JB takes back between his fingers his pencil and reprises his sketching anew, ready to get reabsorbed by their original occupation.  
Not for the first time, Tammy wonders how much good can come from those rapid, untactful scribbles of his. But then, judging by the way he spoke earlier, her portrayer has not much interest invested in the result of his efforts.  
And she is not forced to stay with him.

“Is JB short for something?”

“Not really, it’s just an old childhood nickname which has struck”

In truth, JB is been the Alias Alfred has struck on his son when he has decided 11 years old is the perfect age to help out your old man with his most questionable line of business…. In the capacity of drug courier. Who does look more unsuspecting for amphetamines&Co-home-service than a scrawny child? 

Imagining the horrified reaction this more sincere explanation would elicit from his model, Jonathan cannot contain a grin. This girl amuses him immensely, especially when she doesn’t mean to. Glancing up to her questioning gaze from behind his sketchbook, he doesn’t help himself:

“Hey, my name is Jonathan Spencer, if you need one of my cell numbers…” 

“Don’t tire your memory out, I’ll ask Amanda. Or Jenna”

She doesn’t act offended or struck up anymore- It becomes her in a way JB wouldn’t contemplate. 


	7. Chapter 7

  
**CHAPTER 6. All Along The Crooked Path**

Tammy contemplates unsatisfied her reflection : the girl in the mirror isn’t her. The top she wears- glittery, flimsy blue texture, low on the back – is borrowed from the Amanda’s wardrobe and it shows. Her skirt at least reaches her knees but she’s not used to high heels.

  
“You look amazing” 

  
The breezy comment of her dorm mate has her turning around instinctively, to find the red-head on the threshold of their shared bathroom.  
One glance suffices to valuate that Amanda is the one who looks amazing: her curls are twisted elegantly in a French knot, her black dress is long, sleeveless and adhering like a second skin…. And her makeup is faultless. 

“Thank you”

Amanda sways to stand beside Tammy and passes her snow-white arm around the blonde’s shoulders. Their reflected images make a striking contrast, and Tammy gives in the impulse to lean in, cheek to cheek with her friend, like if some of her glow could be stolen away. 

“I cannot believe you accepted to join our team of party girls. After two years of promising me and standing me up for whatever exam, I was beginning to think you were made of ice and books ” 

Tammy shakes her head, pensively:

“I’ve just the feeling that if I let what’s happened with Sandy Foster to get me, I won’t go anywhere anymore. And maybe I was too quick to relegate partying in high school memories. ”

“I’ll be sure to remind you of this brilliant speech in few months- or weeks, or days- when you’ll be begging me to let you obsessing over the finals ”  
Amanda jokes, nodding vigorously her head in exaggerated approval, before adding casually “Just don’t hang around JB too much, he might get the wrong idea ”   
Tammy’s head turns 180 ° so quickly it hurts

“Which idea would be that ?”

Oh come on, you saw him. He has always around some salivating fan girl eager to put it out like if it isn’t ever hers. He likes it simple. I’m not blind or deaf and people saw the two of you talking lately. You passed a rough deal with Foster. Don’t risk it ”

Speechless, Tammy glares the other girl, hoping but not believing it can be some very un-amusing joke. So far, Amanda has not hinted to her awareness of the improving acquaintance between her room mate and her occasional boyfriend. It’s true that, since JB has rescued her, they talk mopre often but Tammy has not never contemplated Amanda could be bothered by it.

“I’m not trowing myself to him! He… speaks to me sometimes, he may have walked me to class once but it’s nothing to be … jealous over!”

Reapplying her dark lipstick, Amanda pauses to offer a transparently fake laughter which offends Tammy more than anything she has said previously.

“Jealous? Tammy I’m just looking out for you. I’m sorry if it bursts your golden bubble.”

Another party, a disco Club with darkened salons and metallic enlightening.  
Tammy moves her body in response to the angry beat of the music. Lost in the raging rhythm, it’s easy forgetting it’s music becoming her mood, not the other way around.  
The glances she receives once in awhile from Jenna or Amanda bring her brusquely back to reality. Out of three guys who came on her tonight, she has seen two talking with Jenna- it’s insulting, that someone she considers a friend thinks so little of her to set her sister on her case to prevent her from jumping her love-interest. Is it why they invited her? 

It’s a stupid, humiliating concept.  
Tammy surprises again the two siblings looking at her and giggling: JB just came in.

Afterwards, she will remember this moment trying to understand if something had possessed her except the impulse to spite her unwanted rivals, because there’s no doubt, no faltering behind her steps as she goes to JB, tap on his shoulder and asks cheekily: “Hi Jonathan, dance with me? “

Tammy tosses deliberately her long locks back over her shoulders: yes, the expression on their faces is so worth it.

“I knew you couldn’t be as nice as you look, Tam-Tam ”

His breath behind her ear sends cold and hot shivers rippling from her skin to deep in her bones.  
Tammy’s gaze stays fixed on the Amanda’s visage, whose features blurred by distance are twisted in a unbecoming manner, yet her awareness is limited to the arms which surrround her waist; a ghost of sense-memory dances barely out of her reach, assuring her that yes, he has already held her once .  
Her knees give out under her weight and it’s easy, so easy melting agaionst JB, letting her lower back press rythmically, lightly agaist his.   
And although she has never doneanything remotely like this in her life, althought it’s clear this is at least 300 different, dangerous kinds of wrong, she can’t act differently.

  
He’s not even groping her, but their bodies brush so close than he hardly neeeds to - probably JB can feel eavy and each inch of her without shifting his hands from her hips, exactly like she does.

The strange, decadent intimacy of this contact is wwhat she has always imagined sex like.  
There’s a new, buzzing warmth spreading from her loins to her neck, her skin is amazingly sensitive anywhere he toches her, anywhere she touches him. These foreign sensations are not entirely pleaseant- they are invasive, heady, embarassing- dancing with JB it’s not so different from a slow suffocation. Yet she must appreciate it in some elusive measure, because she stays and gives in.  
And when Tammy glances up to his face, JB is giving her another of those... lusty once-overs which leave her feeling so unclean.She offers what could pass for a flirtatious smile.

But every dance must come at a end before or later and as the music changes from a quick beat to a slower one, Tammy senses the stretch on her lips growing stale and knees threaten to tremble.

She remover her hand fromhis elbow with mercurial swiftness, restabilishing the distance between them.

“You know, Tam-Tam, you can dance but- ” 

He’s begginning to say something but Tammy cannot hear him beyond the background trumming in head. So she must not, she must not she must not absolutely alllow him to finish whatever it is. 

“I must go, excuse me”

t’s a sad exit scene and she’s sure she has not managed it with grace; definitely she has no sympathy for the hues of standoffishness and panic coloring her own voice.

When JB grabs her wist to stop her retreaty, Tammy is not surprised.But what he says after ? That’s unexpected .

“Tam-Tam? If you never decide to drop he Sanctimonious Act and follow through what you started here, this is at your complete desposal. Anytime ” 

JB pronounces his proposition so smoothly than she doesn’t understand until she sees the way his hands are gesturing to the lowest part of his anatomy... then she’s just gaping in shockto stammer:

“You.. you are the most... you are a such chauvinistic, complete... self-absorbed pig! ”

JB’s dark eyes light up while he scratches his chin almost pensively: “Mmh... I’m not sure about what you are accusing me of, but I’m sure you like it in a man”

As she runs from him, Tammy is so incensed than she barely registers a pang of disappointment... because this time, he’s not chasing her.


	8. The Persephone ‘s Shadow

**CHAPTER 7 : The Persephone ‘s Shadow**

In the weeks following The Event Tammy Layne Winslow ‘s mind was resolute to block out and pass off as ‘The Party Accident N° 2’ , she and JB met casually more often than she would like. 

It was always JB to coerce her into a conversation and Tammy has learnt soon how indulging him can be very more inconspicuous than rejecting him, since her persecutor has no moral qualms about causing flamboyant, embarrassing and very public scenes unless he gets his way. Usually Tammy manages to maintain a variable degree of constraint before his dubiously funny pick-up lines and he presumably forgets her the moment she gets out of his sight. 

That’s okay with her, of course… she doesn’t expect or wishes otherwise. She just… looks at him once in awhile. Sort of. When she thinks no one- especially not him- will notice. 

She knows it’s wrong and she keeps repeating to herself he’s not all that interesting . She is not even really interested in him. 

It’s just… the way he does all those supposedly friendly expressions with no true warmth, the way he shows consideration for nobody beside himself or how easily he succeeds in persuading so many people that his jerk-act is endearing rather than insufferable.  
He’s different from whoever else she has ever known and therefore it is not so strange if she occasionally, cautiously observes him .   
It’s not like if any ill can come from looking and, well, lusting a little.   
So what difference it does if she finds his body and his face attractive? She hates that twisted mind of mind without any chances of appeal, and this is why nothing of definite will ever happen between them.

  
If only Amanda could get it.

  
“Don’t get all over yourself only because JB is playing nice with you. It’s obvious he has no serious intention .No real intention.”   
The Tammy’s back bumps against the wall of her room. Amanda and four of her friends are surrounding her and she cannot believe she escaped from certain situations in high school just to learn the charm of them in college.

Amanda sounds haughty and, shockingly enough, serious. At her side, Francine – a long-faced brunette- nods and adds   
“ You should have a more realistic outlook on yourself. Do you truly think you can insinuate yourself in his graces with a pathetic game of chase and pull?”

“I’m not –” 

“ And it’s not loyal to Amanda, who is your friend. ”

“You should be sincere with her, at least !”

Tammy shakes her head, unable of convincing herself of the actuality of being bullied in silence by… the Amanda’s goons – there’s any other name for them, possibly?- in her college years.  
“I’m not after JB! So what if we have conversations? It doesn’t mean anything and nothing is happened or will happen! ” 

Apparently, no comment could have spurned Amanda more in her hysterics.

“ It’s exactly this falsity of yours which nauseates me. I don’t care if JB sees others girls and do you know why ? They don’t mean a thing except for a quick roll in the sack. But if you are dead wrong if you think I will allow you to weasel your way in my relationship, all while pretending to-”

“Amanda-”

“ I‘ve seen his charcoal Tammy, so drop it !”

“ His what? ”  
“ The Hoffman Exposition. I’m sure you can spare a special space in your book-wormed memory to recall it. Since you are the model and all”

For a moment Amanda seems so upset than Tammy is quite afraid the other girl is either about giving into tears or about slapping her silly 

“ Just ask him. He sketched me only once while I thanked him for the Sandy’s ordeal. If I had believed he was serious about it, I would told you !”

Tammy tries to lean in and touch her roommate in reassurance but Francine pulls her forcibly back against the wall, holding on her shoulder a bit too tight and gaining a satisfied grimace from an anorexic-looking oxygenated blonde at her right. Amanda instead stands suddenly up stiffly in a quite transparent picture of frigid annoyance.

“Just know I don’t consider you a friend anymore.”  
The admission has all the nuances of a threat and Tammy is tempted to specify they are never been much more than dormmates.

The Art Exposition organized by the Prof. Arthur Hoffmann for the end of the semester occupies whole a wing of the edifice and it is been a tradition of Yale fore years, but Tammy remembers visiting it only in her first year, during a particularly enthusiastic and excited phase of academic exploration.

Now she is surrounded by watercolours, charcoals and chalks, she regrets this resolution and the opportunities she lost because of it. She discovers the brilliance of all those contrasting colours and the smell of paint have a very peculiar capacity for soothing her nerves while exciting her senses.

In spite of the happenings which so recently spoiled her day, there’s a part of her mind which is totally enthralled… Art creates worlds inside worlds and it’s truly too bad she has no talent for it. 

JB mentioned the recurring theme for students of his year is about classical mythology, but she takes her time in locating the area reserved for those works because simply wandering in this improvised museum is like facing a window on a fairytales world.

She used to love Mythology in high school….immensely.

If her presence draws attention, she doesn’t notice until she spots two students pointing at her more than once as they talk animatedly. Mildly miffed, she turns in their direction, keeping her head high and challenging them to embarrass her with a defiant glance. They don’t notice.

Three other people are glancing at her more or less covertly – one of them is old enough to be a teacher.

Striding toward their section of the exposition, Tammy is relieved to find a clay bust representing Mars, quite rudimental even to her untrained eye, and an white and black watercolour of what probably are the Furies.

Then, suddenly, she sees It and Tammy blinks instinctively at first, because it’s almost like looking at her mirror’s reflection.   
It is not a charcoal, but an ink portrait of brilliant and dark colours, like an illustration out of comics book. It should not be surprising learning Amanda ignores the difference between the two. 

The girl in the portrait shares her features, yet she is so much more beautiful. A pitch black background envelopes her figure and blends in the cloak covering her shoulders. Her hair are a sun-lit blonde vividly contrasting with the all-encompassing darkness and her eyes are sky-colored . Her lips are pursued in a smile midway between inviting and distant, her cheeks are flushed and the hand she extends toward the viewer is holding a pomegranate. 

The plate underneath reads: Persephone- J. Spencer .

According the Greek myth Persephone was the radiant, innocent daughter of Demeter- Goddess of the Harvest and of Fertility- and Zeus, King of Olympus.

Once upon a time when seasons didn’t yet exist, Hades, God Of the Underworld, saw a lovely maiden picking flowers along with her friends by a lake and he was instantly enchanted by her untainted beauty. It was Persephone. After having obtained her hand in marriage by her father, Hades split the hearth open underneath her feet and he spirited Persephone away in the fathomless depths of his dark realm. There, he seduced her and their marriage was celebrated while Demeter, unaware of the Zeus ‘ decision and furious for her daughter’s disappearance, unleashed her temper by casting on hearth a timeless winter.  
Eventually Zeus was forced to step in before every living thing perished in hunger and cold, ordering Hades the restitution of his consort. But Hades was cunning and he offered his beloved a pomegranate, the Underworld fruit, because if she would ate anything which was grown in his Realm of Death, she would never be able to leave it again. Persephone, at ease by now with her new role of Queen, accepted the fruit but ingested just limited number of its seeds. At last the war between Hades and Demeter ended with a compromise: Persephone would spend half of every year beside her mother on the surface and the other half by her husband’s side.

Tammy used to think the legend was sad, because the young goddess

struggle to conciliate two opposite facets of her nature was meant to never end… it was tragically romantic.

To know JB has seen Persephone in her… it encourages Tammy to wonder if he perceives himself as a gloomy, tempestuous king of Dead. It would be a strange imaginary, because nobody else is quite so alive as her recalcitrant artist: when JB is here, it always feels like if he fills whole the room and there’s barely any place for other people. 

“ Wow ”

  



	9. Wanderlust

**CHAPTER 8 : Wanderlust**

  
Jonathan doesn’t sleep more than 4 hours straight par night since he was eight years old. Perhaps it’s the fact he has spent a such large part of his life being either angry or scared than the sheer anxiety of it crystallized somewhere inside the deepest recesses of his mind, but do you know what? 

In his all but modest opinion, it is been not so bad: hit back before someone else can contemplate to target you, exploit the another’s weaknesses and yours will never discovered, wear your battle scars proudly and nobody will put them down, think the worst and you will never be disappointed. 

Living with bitterness and anger means painting them all over the reality around you- you laugh of those silly illusions which allow so many people to rest more easily at night and you fed on your few concrete certainties, aware that none will bother taking them from you at least. It’s living on a rollercoaster 24/7 and knowing it makes you to feel alive.

Except the fury inside you ends growing and growing until there’s barely any place for anything else. You wake up one morning and you realize it gives you nausea – you suddenly would give anything to turn anger off and jump off the rollercoaster. 

Wonder of wonders, this is exactly when you learn you can’t to do that anymore. You don’t remember how.

You are struck on, baby.

So you keep on hurting the only mother you have known until you have burnt your last bridge and when she gives up on you, you repeat yourself you don’t care, you knew she was a quitter all along. 

  
Alfred is not here anymore but you continue to hate the world, to find satisfaction in drawing the worst out of everyone. 

It must be something wrong with them-Marissa, Reva, Richard, Edmund and everybody who have seen or intuited how messed up your life used to be and did nothing. It must be something wrong with them, so you can hate them and not wonder if there’s something so very wrong about you which leads people to think you deserve whatever you get.

In your dark corner of universe, you are a king and you are chainless. If you don’t sleep at night, it is not because you know no peace but because you got so much to do : business, booze, sex… drawing. 

Jonathan only draws seriously at night: in the nocturnal stillness his thoughts take shape on paper so easily. He has done it for years without thinking too much of it, but then Marissa wanted him in Yale and he wanted her money, and drawing is something he manages decently without much effort so no damage was done.

More often than not, the figures he traces on paper are snapshots of his waking nightmares, footprints of a restless subconscious. Portraying Tamara Layne is been different.

Tammy .

Her perfect façade hides so much of more than it appears. 

On the outside Tammy is flawless, so easy to tarnish in all her sweetness and light. But underneath the pink sugar coating, the feel of all her broken pieces lures him in. 

She is a flame asking to be attended, an appetite ready to be awoken – by his touch - and he couldn’t ask for anything better than watching her as she burns and consumes in his arms. 

He’s quite certain he didn’t want her so bad before fixing the delicate, unassuming grace of her features on ink , yet after spending so many hours studying the brusque sketches he drew during their first real conversation he could not remain ignorant or indifferent before her beauty.   
His memory keeps revisiting the enticing, soft curves of her figure – no longer for necessity, but for his personal enjoyment- and he wonders how it would feel peeling off all those unnecessary layers of anonymous clothing she uses to shield her body from casual appreciation.

The most amazing thing is …. Tammy doesn’t even know how attractive, how appetizing she looks to everyone she meets, even in her more standoffish moments. She is so totally unaware of her class, of her potential than she fights hard to defend herself from him and from the world. 

  
JB wont even try blocking her out of his erotic fantasies. True, Tammy is not what he is used to – he usually finds no purpose in long pursuits when easy, uncomplicated tumbles are so much more manageable. 

But this girl could be worth it… he feels it in his bones while he contemplates whether he would touch her slowly, enjoying the rush her inexperience would give him or more roughly, erasing forever the memory of every idiot she never dated. 

In quality of male individual perfectly at ease with his sexaholic nature, JB still finds almost unnatural centring his imagination around one subject for so long . But then, it’s an undeniable fact he usually concretizes his fantasies before they get a chance to acquire any real complex. 

  
Therefore, if the girl in question drops by his door with no forewarning, one evening like many, he‘s pretty much entitled to be speechless. 

Having spent whole last night at a illegal rave in the suburbs, he has recently collapsed on the couch, half-dressed and stinking of smoke and sweat, until the doorbell ‘s ugly drilling interrupted his few hours of well deserved slumber. 

This has unnerved him already, because he ‘s always been a light-sleeper, self-trained to rise at the faintest alarm – the stifled sound of the Marissa’s sobs from the adjoining bedroom, the distinctive pace of the Alfred’s footsteps on the passage…he still awakes with their echo in his ears some mornings, like if by some bizarre joke of destiny his memory has suspended him in a bleak niche of time. 

He has not bothered putting a shirt on, so when he opens the door he’s just wearing faded jeans and a consumed grey vest . 

Tammy stands there, all beautiful and refined looking in her hippy white chemise and ankle-length lavender skirt and every single rude comment on his mouth dies . JB is tempted to shake his head vigorously to clear whether she is the result of a particularly vivid dream. 

To his sleep-hazed gaze the blonde girl appears almost glowing in the half-light of his threshold, but as his eyes close in on her face he can see Tammy has this diffident-little-bunny expression, the one she gets always around him in real life but never in his fantasies. 

“ Surprise, surprise ”

He drawls, his voice roughened by slumber. Speechless is not the Randall style, after all. 

“Hello Jonathan ”

Even if she manages rendering it awfully formal, he likes the way Tammy has taken to refer him by his full first name; for someone so apt at pet-naming whoever, he has always had an immediate dislike for the ones who tried shortening his own name like if it diminished his importance. 

“Come in” he invites her, pretending for her benefit this visit is an every-day occurrence. 

She follows him inside, glancing subtly around to study her surroundings. Her tread is light and careful – it plants in his head the picture of a bird flitted down on the ground, ready to fly away if startled. 

In his economic flat way too distant from the campus, Tammy looks misplaced. How has she learnt his address? 

Probably from Amanda- he decides- the redhead lately is gaining a dangerous propensity to spread around sordid details of their imaginary affair. 

“I’ve been at the Exposition today, I’ve seen your portrait. It’s … really well done. You are very talented ”

“ I’m a guy with hidden depths. You didn’t go all this way to thank me, do you?”

Tammy’s silvery giggle floats in the room, lightening the mood. 

“I swear I won’t do it”

“ Fine, because I did not portrayed you as a personal favour. I had to portray someone ”

“You were not forced to choose me. You could have picked Amanda, Jenna or… that peroxide- haired girl you keep around lately ”

“Mmmh, are you finally flirting with me? ”

Smiling in a definitely flirty manner, Tammy shakes her head : meet the Queen of Mixed Signals. 

“I just don’t get why me” 

“Look at you. You are so … pretty. Even beautiful. Inside. Outside. I bet you look even more appetizing just you slide out of your sheets at morning. It isn’t what an artist is supposed to single out in his model?”

Judging by the immediate, rosy flush of her cheeks he could almost believe she isn’t used to be openly, suggestively complimented. It’s unexpected and unusual, but it plays to his vantage. But just for the record, exactly which kind of idiots has this girl frequented so far? 

Tsk, probably white-collared faggots pre-approved by her family.

“Do you really think I’m beautiful? ”

Now, she’s just fishing for compliments. Although recent experience has fully demonstrated to him Tammy is no stammering angel, he must give her credit: she does sound like if she means it.

Jonathan raises his hands in mock surrender: “ I swear, crossing on my heart, you are the most beautiful girl to ever come in this place”

“ Now, that would be some accomplishment !”

She comments coyly, staring straight in his eyes for the first time since her arrival. Suddenly, she doesn’t look so scared anymore and JB realizes with refreshing clarity what she came for .

Tonight his pursuit is going to end. 

So, Tammy is not special after all. She’s just another in a long line who wanted to screw him, so that she would get some exciting novelty to distinguish her from her boring friends. It sits well with him. 

He has never doubted he could have her, if he persisted long enough, yet he can feel a trifle of disappointment mingling with predatory anticipation. Because probably, she will be out of his mind the moment he will get inside her hot, tight body.

“Your modesty humbles me, Tam-Tam, but you can bet I’m a fair, experienced judge. Ask around ”

“I wouldn’t care if you had said the same thing to every other girl who got past that door. I’m not modest, I’m realistic. I know what guys say about me here: since I’m not easy, I must be some… stuck-up ice queen who feels too high to mix with commoners. I’m not neither, but your Persephone? That’s whom I wished I would become someday. I don’t know how you did, but you saw it before I did ”

Tammy is passing her fingers through her golden tresses, moving them behind her ear in a subconsciously self-effacing gesture - giving him an opening to cut the chase and seize the prize. He closes the distance between them and takes her visage between his hands, repeating her previous action with very deliberate slowness, admiring the cobalt shade of her eyes and the silkiness of her blonde hair slipping between his fingers.

“Poor Tammy. – he mocks without any real intent of offence- Everyone believe you are this pure, breakable angel, but I do see you, sweetie. All what you are waiting for is an excuse to melt the ice. Do you want to get dirty, do you? ”

He half-expects her backing off, denying and protesting but it doesn’t happen . Instead, she glances up at him through her lashes. Her chin trembles, but only lightly. 

“Can you do it for me? ”

She whispers and he is not sure why but her gaze feels deeper, probing. It makes her more appealing than ever, rousing an unforeseen urgency to taste her skin. 

There’s not a single good reason to resist, so JB leans in placing one open-mouthed kiss against her throat. 

He feels her pulse hammering under his lips as a sharp intake in her breath escapes her. 

She moves her head to the side, giving him easy access and while he goes on, exploring the soft curve of her neck with rough, lingering, humid kisses, her flavour and the warmth of her proximity thicken his lust . Jonathan is already drowning within all the simple yet complicated pleasures associated with sex :he can feel her pulse growing faster under his lips and imagine the smell of her moistening cunt. 

Jonathan smiles, lowering his eyelids in a flare of arousal especially intense. Then he pulls her forward, surrounding Tammy with his arms and pressing her tighter against him, satisfied because she leans in obediently to rest her mouth against his. 

For Tammy, his kiss isn’t romantic…it’s uncomfortable even, when JB invades her mouth with his typical, demanding unconstraint and she’s terrified of doing anything wrong. But it is sexy…God, if it’s sexy! 

She stands on tip-toe, wrapping herself around him as she kisses him back eagerly, completely, heatedly. It comes so naturally than it should be scary. 

After a lifetime of waiting around for the right guy, she is giving up her ultimate defences for the most wrong one of all, for no better reason than she wants to. 

On his tongue she can taste rum and cigarettes and the simple knowledge she would be able to kiss him like this forever, the awareness she is free of touching him anywhere she desires… are exhilarating. 

With every kiss JB kills some more of everything she is never been, because if she can only find herself in this embrace so inappropriate, then she is truly been stone until his lips turned her in flesh and blood and tingling nerves.

Her hands grab the hem of his vest, pulling it impatiently up

ward to skim along the solid, clammy planes of his naked back, initiating a frenzied exploration.   
His caresses on both her sides , under her chemise, go up and down according a rhythm alternatively slower and swifter, undermining the coherence of her thoughts.  
Their mouth rarely break apart at all, like if even air is suddenly became a less pressuring necessity in front of their growing hunger for each other. 

Perhaps it’s not love, but right here and now Tammy might adore this crass, roguish stranger for the way he’s making her senses drunk in an endless haze.   
Maybe she does adore him- it feels like if he is both God and Satan, her rapist and her savior. 

His right hand strays under her cotton white underwear, and she cries out loudly… only the insisting pressure of his left one on her buttocks stops her from jerking away. 

Jonathan plays it slow, tracing her lower lips throughout the thin texture before twisting his hand to insinuate his probing fingers underneath the hem of her panties. He can feel her wetness even before sliding deeper inside. Two of his fingertips press down on her clit, with just the right balance between hard and easy perfected from a wide, proud experience. 

At every pause and twitch of his fingers between her wet folds, he can hear Tammy panting and feel her shuddering while she almost collapses against his larger frame, hiding her face in his chest. . 

Entranced by her responsiveness, Jonathan teases her with increasing pressure and rhythm, enjoying too much her grasps and the liquid, welcoming heat searing his hand…he must force himself to grow still for few interminable seconds, inhaling and exhaling deeply to fight a primal instinct to roll up her skirt and drive himself home here and now.

He has not waited this so long for few fugacious minutes of satisfaction.

Even if he’s already so hard it is beginning to hurt. 

He cannot explain why he is so dangerously close to shake with need - It’s not been that long since last time he has had a girl. Definitely not. 

Feeling Tammy is seconds away from orgasming in his hand, JB pulls back from her abruptly, gripping on her forearms more tightly than necessary to keep some space between their bodies . 

Tammy gnaws on her bottom lip, trying to catch her breathing, shaken and bewildered but unable to pinpoint why. 

She’s been so close to… well, she didn’t even know it could happen like that. Why has he stopped, right then? She looks up hesitantly, but he is staring some empty space ahead and his expression is tight. Maybe she has done something wrong. 

What does she know? Maybe she was not supposed to react like that. Maybe he thinks she’s slutty now. 

Right, whereas his usual company …he looks down on her and her thoughts halt brusquely. 

Uneasy under his focus , she reaches for him, cupping his nape and coercing JB back into a kiss.   
He spreads his fingers wide on her lower back, flushing her against him as he slides his right hand up to feel up her breast. 

It feels so good than Tammy almost bites his lower lip, but she manages to behave by sinking her nails in his back. 

  
The perception of his hardness against her thigh – and then of his hands stilling on her hips- freezes her hands on his strong shoulder blades.

Jonathan has stopped kissing her : he is looking in her eyes expectantly .

“I want you”

He says, with that familiar and unfamiliar slur which is been so oddly, helplessly compelling since forever. 

Tammy feels a bizarre itch to trace those inviting, so often cruel lips but she lacks the courage to follow the impulse. 

She closes her eyes as his tongue follows the contours of her jaw and trails down the curve of her neck. 

The purely sexual surge of electricity expanding from his bodyheat to hers surprises Tammy again . It isn’t just a urban legend after all. 

Her fingers tremble while they tumble with the button of his jeans and Tammy is never been more ashamed and self-conscious in her existence.

When he begins helping her out, panic turns her ears chrisom and her pupils lucid- for one earth-shattering moment Tammy is sure she is about breaking down and crying… but then cool air sensitizes her naked breasts and JB’ s thumb is under her chin .

His gaze has the rich intensity of dark chocolate – enticing and unsparing- and tears never come. The only place she falls into is those eye’s bottomless, unwelcoming depths.

“Are you okay? ”

Jonathan follows her lips as they open and close slowly, even more intently when her tongue snakes out to moisten them. If Tammy isn’t different nor special, why is she getting under his skin?

“Yeah, just… I’ve never done this before ”

“This being sex? ”

“I… yes”

Naively, Tammy has hoped he wouldn’t notice the difference, at least until much later. The sheer humiliation of this admission would destroy her if he would stop touching her… but he is not relenting at all.

His bold caresses are setting a pattern, skin-charging yet oddly soothing.

“We can stop anytime”

The gentleness in voice catches her by surprise and it’s enough to reassure her, she is not wrong in trusting him with this . Everything ’s all right.

“ No – she assures him, shaking her head - I’m done waiting for Prince Charming. I want this with you now. ”

Tammy wants *he* is her first One, even if she don’t fully understands it.   
Jonathan kisses her brow so tenderly than she wonders, while he buries his face in the crook of her neck, inhaling the scent of her hair, if sex is always like this. 

If for awhile, it doesn’t matter how meaningless is the act in itself, your heart shatters sweetly in tiny pieces like if you are in love.

“Shh, I swear you, it will be so good than you will not remember how you managed so long without.”

His low-voiced promise is too suggestive to be meant to reassure: it holds both promises and threats of what is to come. 

Smirking down to her, JB has never looked more alien: a so cold and hard beauty stares back from behind his eyes, and she would never suppose she could yearn so viscerally for someone so distant from herself.   
Yet nipping at his lips is her only defence from the hammering instinct which is commanding her to bring him to the floor and be done with this. 

  
Soon she’s kissing him, getting him out of his vest, kissing him again as he leads her in his bedroom.

She barely realizes how it happens, how Tammy Winslow of all the people is ended naked with her back on a drug dealer’s unmade bed, her chest heaving and her mouth swollen, pleading without words for something she doesn’t really gets. 

Probably it shouldn’t reassure her how unbothered by her inexperience her lover acts: he doesn’t mind guiding her hands whenever she gets hesitant, showing her exactly how he wants to be touched and how much he enjoys it. 

He spreads her thighs wide, leaving her knees dangling out the mattress with a shameless confidence she is truly grateful for… and which she finds more than mildly arousing. 

Then JB balances himself on his elbows and his hold on her hips becomes softer, almost like if seeking confirmation. She smiles and hides her face against the hollow of his throat, allowing her eyes to drift shut just before she can feel him making his way inside her, slowly.

Tv is on in the adjoining room …she holds on its distant chatter to block out the stinging pain of his penetration . 

Yet, afterwards she will barely remember this detail. What will stay imprinted in her memory is the rush of feminine power accompanying the awareness she was the one to affect Jonathan Spencer so much to leave him shuddering and grunting in arousal.

And before that, the dreamlike boneless feeling of her first orgasm when the JB’ s hands wandered between her thighs, while he murmured hot indecencies in her ear. 


	10. Prism

**CHAPTER 9: Prism**

Jonathan has dozed off for few hours after sex. He rolls over, half-awake, to feel his shoulder bumping against something solid. Lazily, Jonathan cracks an eye open and finds a blonde girl staring him.   
Not being unused to awakening with a stranger between his sheets, he yawns for effect and allows his mind to wander to earlier moments, to…Tammy. 

He blinks slowly, focusing on her visage: it’s Tammy all right, all wrapped in his linens, curled up in foetal position.  
Jonathan examines the extraneous presence in his bed with fascination: her face is flushed, her hair tangled and wild. Her neck sports the mark of his mouth and he cannot help to feel satisfied. 

Tammy smiles shyly to him and she looks so …candid than he feels compelled to reach out and touch her .  
Her cheek is soft and warm under his fingertips as she leans in his touch, allowing his hand to cradle her jaw. It surprises him, like if she could not possibly be been real until now. 

She snuggles closer to his body, resting her head on his chest, and then her eyes flutter closed.

JB squints down, noticing Tammy looks quite prepared to …sleep on him?

Like if she seems to be taking for granted she is entitled to, er- stay ?

He isn’t sure about what he is supposed to do at this point- girls don’t usually stay in his apartment THAT long . If someone has to sleep over in his one-night-stands, it’s usually him, and even that has very rarely happened since when he was in high school and his priority was staying out Randall house as long as he could get away with .

So… well, this one isn’t exactly the type he could kick out his room without sitting through hours of drama.

Furrowing hard his brows, Jonathan pats hesitantly her back and he feels her smiling lips on his sternum, her nipples brushing his abdomen .

Maybe it will be just easier putting up with her presence until tomorrow morning- he muses while he closes his eyes anew, trying to get used to the warm shape settled against his body.

  
It isn’t so bad. 

\--

Six weeks later, Jonathan Spencer and Tammy Layne-Winslow have not a love story, nor a relationship. 

Although sometimes Tammy must admit what they have feels like both and neither. 

There are no strings attached, yet Tammy drops by his flat quite often and they usually have steamy, uncomplicated sex -she likes thinking she’s rediscovering her Shayne roots. 

Funny, how she never considered herself a sensual person until she met JB, but it’s only when she is around him she finally understands what all the fuss about ‘carnal desires ‘ truly is. It’s an incredible relief learning she is not impassioned like she was beginning to guiltily suspect

Nobody has never touched her or looked at her like he does and everything appears turned by the upside down when he is beside her. 

The not so casual dates between them aren’t secret and they are lasting a lot longer than anyone expected- including them- but she never mentions them or why Amanda won’t speak to her anymore in her long phone calls to home. It’s exciting and new having a secret of her own. 

They started dating by going out for breakfast when Tammy spent her first night in his apartment and before they realized it was happening JB had taken on himself the challenge to teach her the fine art of relaxing. 

Today Jonathan has no definition for their arrangement, but knowing it is not serious by no measure tranquillizes him enough. If he is not seeing other girls it’s only because this one doesn’t leave him sufficient free time, not because he and Tammy are exclusive.

Surprisingly, he doesn’t miss the variety of his previous sexual escapades. Maybe Tammy is curing some of his disapproval for monogamy, but she is not like all those other rich, snobbish chits, stuffed with pearls and dollars but unsubstantial underneath their skin. She listens him like if all what he says _matters_ and she looks at him with stars in her eyes, like if he is her savior as much as the person she longs to save .

He enjoys awakening with the welcoming sensation of her naked body spooned against his, of her hair spread on his cushion , of her legs entwined with his. It’s new and it’s different, yet it unsettles him how much those little details warm him over. 

Sometimes, when she sleeps over, Tammy has to get up first for running somewhere, she leaves him his breakfast ready and inviting on his kitchen table before leaving silently without waking him up : it shocks the hell out of him every time. 

Maybe, although this is not like him, who loves sex but finds any traditional relationships-crap useless, the smallest things could - only this once, only with her - make all the difference. 

If anything else, he might need this… this unconditional, sunny glow Tammy has about her whenever he compliments her or comes to simply hang around her. 

Maybe it will be worth some monotony.

It’s temporary, anyway: only because he is moderately fond of her, it doesn’t mean he won’t get bored… first or later, Tammy is bound to lose her candid bedroom enthusiasm to a more womanly experience. 

Yes, he is going to lose interest in her then, but he won’t hurt her one moment before that, if he can avoid it. He won’t give her the satisfaction of sliding out their routine pegging him as the bad guy. 

Who can tell ? He may not need to break it up - she could outgrow him first. 

\--

Tammy repeats often to herself she comes back to JB because he won’t send her away, but the truth is… it would be simpler walking out their tryst before she got to know him. 

When she has set their history in motion, she was just really tired of compromising and denying herself her wants, her caprices: getting genuinely attached to him seemed unlikely. 

She kept coming back to his bed because there, his mouth and hands and tongue remade her anew.

She has not realized how addictive would become the sensation of free falling from her pedestal.  
Jonathan has set her free, but only for to trapping her with heavier chains: while weeks stretched in four months she has seen… things about him and now she can’t look away from them.

For example, Tammy cannot forget he sleeps always with TV or radio turned on when he is alone, because silence sets his nerves on edge and she wonders if it is because he feels alone –God forbid, he wouldn’t never admit it, even to himself- or because he’s so constantly agitated than he can hardly tolerate a chaos-less reality. 

He doesn’t read so much and he doesn’t get very involved with academic activities because, by being dyslexic, he has spent a consistent part of his childhood striving to convince his teachers he was just a slacker, rather than an idiot. 

_Old habits die hard, Tam Tam_

And when Tammy has to fall asleep by herself, her mind turns to him: where he’s, what he is doing and with whom, worrying and praying often he is not doing anything dangerous. 

Sometimes, these questions fill her with disquieting restlessness : Jonathan doesn’t care about consequences, when he is convinced of his motives he is capable of anything. Anything, to the point of self-destruction. 

There’s a such absence of compassion in him, and it is directed mostly toward himself; he could rip his own world into pieces and smirk all throughout it like if it didn’t matter.

She likes to consider, when her palms run along the smooth expanse of his chest, than she would absorb his bitterness throughout the pores of her skin if only they were able to make love long enough to get it all out of his system.

There are layers and layers in Jonathan Spencer, but deep down he is the most real, self-honest person she has never known.

She won’t let him go until she can avoid it.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 10: Down The Rabbit Hole**

Tammy is strolling throught the campus, basking in the noon’s tepid air. On her face there’s a carefree grin which is more and more frequent lately.  
“Layne! Tammy Layne, wait up!”   
She doesn’t recognizes the male voice calling her but when she turns the sight of a black aired, dark-skinned young man speeding up toward her stops her dead in her tracks. Sandy Foster.

The smile dies on her lips and she isn’t scared, but rather empty of any feeling.  
Strange, because she had almost forgotten about him. Soon, he stands at few steps of distance from her, panting because he had to run for catching up to her.  
“What do you want from me, Foster?”  
Her words can’t be insulting like he would deserve, but at least her voice comes out frosty and colourless, which is possibly the closest to open hostility she will never manage.

“You owe you an apology for…”

“You don’t need reminding me what for! I was there, although not thanks to you !”

“I know it’s late for saying I’m sorry! I know it’s inadequate! That’s why I didn’t come to you before! I don’t deserve your forgiveness but you need knowing I wouldn’t act upon what I- ”

“Then why have you drugged me at all? ”  
She cuts in, dominating barely a wave of old, awakening anger.

“I don’t know! I swear I don’t know what came over me! It was an an horrible time of my life and I was desperate for anything which would make me feel like a man…I thank God Jonathan was there to stop me because otherwise…I think I would kill myself. I meant just- I didn’t think I would ever be been able to get a girl to want me in any other way. It was a terrible mistake. A terrible mistake… ”  
Seeing Sandy now- his visage contracted in apparent despair, feverish, bulging eyes, hands closed in trembling fists- it’s difficult to consider him a dangerous rapist. She doesn’t want believing him, but he looks the very picture of sincerity...and Jonathan has mentioned something about his famility. If she recalls correctly, it was a joke about Sandy being brought up by a bunch of strict, homophobic and racist financers who preferred locking up his youngest members in private schools rather bothering to teach them their prejudices themselves.

“So why are you here now?”  
“Jonathan. He is my oldest friend. My only real friend. We knew each other from so long time and I didn’t want embarrass him before his first real girlfriend because of a moment of madness. I had to try, at least ”

“It’s useless talking about it now”

The defeated expression on the Sandy’s face takes out the satisfaction of verbally abusing him. There’s no taste in putting down someone who’s already so fucked up on his own. If even Jonathan believes Foster is harmless, maybe she should believe the Sorority Party is only been one very regrettable accident. Maybe it would comfort her.   
Even if she chooses to not forgive him, she won’t be able to avoid him forever. Forgiving would be simpler.  
“I don’t know if I believe you. But I want to”

“I… thank you. You are generous. I don’t deserve it. Of course you must be special if Jon is with you for… are they four months now? It the longest he has never stood by a girl. You are leaving everyone speechless ”  
Sandy seems much more at ease when he talks about his best friend.  
“You admire him, don’t you? I don’t know why.”  
Sandy smiles, looking like whole another person, and nods faintly:  
“I can’t help it. The way Jon lives makes existence appearing so uncomplicated. If I was born more similar to him, I wouldn’t become a man so little believable. ”

“You are exaggerating-”

Wait, has she truly just said that? To her would-could-be-rapist? Maybe Jonathan isn’tso wrong when he mocks herby saying she would forgive her murderer with her dying breath.

“I doubt it, Tammy. Oh, I was going to pass by your boyfriend’s flat before

I met you. Perhaps do you want tagging along? ”

This wasn’t in her programs , but the idea of Jon meeting Sandy outside her knowledge is disturbing, so she agrees to follow him out of the gardens and at the bus stop, chatting of unimportant matters, in spine of her better judgment.   
\--

The JB neighbourhood is deserted at this time and the situation bothers Tammy enough than the chattering she hears from distance seems immediately reassuring. At least until the Jonathan’s irate growls become audible:

“ Do you believe dragging around a blade is enough to entitle you to call yourself a though guy?”

She runs ahead and turns the cornerof the alley: JB has his bachk to her, but she would recognize his frame anywhere. He’s holding a pocket knife in his left hand, out of the reach for the boy crouched at his feet- Tammy recognizes the latter as a member of the Yale basket team- whose nose is bleeding profusely over his dusted shirt.

I met you. Perhaps do you want tagging along? ”

This wasn’t in her programs , but the idea of Jon meeting Sandy outside her knowledge is disturbing, so she agrees to follow him out of the gardens and at the bus stop, chatting of unimportant matters, in spine of her better judgment.   
\--

The JB neighbourhood is deserted at this time and the situation bothers Tammy enough than the chattering she hears from distance seems immediately reassuring. At least until the Jonathan’s irate growls become audible:

“ Do you believe dragging around a blade is enough to entitle you to call yourself a though guy?”

She runs ahead and turns the cornerof the alley: JB has his bachk to her, but she would recognize his frame anywhere. He’s holding a pocket knife in his left hand, out of the reach for the boy crouched at his feet- Tammy recognizes the latter as a member of the Yale basket team- whose nose is bleeding profusely over his dusted shirt.

Sandy cuts in confidentially-again with that irritating sense of normalcy.

“Daddy signed you a cheque, uh? It was about time.”

JB doesn’t smile back to Sandy, but he doesn’t look furious anymore, just… hardened in an impersonal JB-like manner. Then her boyfriend turns back absently to the kneeled athlete:

“Cut the yapping, Drama Queen. You are lucky I got else on my hands right now. You will pay me before Tuesday, for your sake! Are we clear? ”

“Yeah-yah!”

The boy stammers, and even from

her position, Tammy can see he is shaking.  
“Go away, then! Stop polluting my air before I change my mind”

With a suddenness and a rapidity which suggest terror was holding him down more than actual pain, the boy staggers up and runs like if Satan is on his heels.  
“Ah, the basket team? If he had tried out as racer he wouldn’t be sparing any money for amphetamines!”  
Sandy laughs good-naturedly after his friend’s joke, Tammy stays silent.

“You look pale, Tam-tam. Why don’t you wait for me inside?”

The keys of his apartment are dangling before her eyes and she grabs them without thinking. The metal is cold in her sweaty palm.   
Looking up to JB, she doesn’t see a ferocious beast anymore. “Fine”

She turns from him to proceed toward the join

t-ownership edifice where he lives. It’s not that distant, is it? She is been here often, but at this moment, she would doubt of her shadow.  
Tammy looks back only once: Jonathan is having with Sandy what doesn’t appear suspiciously like an animate conversation.

It should lessen her worries, but instead it increases the weight pressing on her lungs.


	12. Chapter 12

**CHAPTER 11: Storm**

  
Tammy waits for Jonathan sitting on his couch, pretending she is watching TV. In reality, she hasn’t the vaguest idea of what channel it’s on.  
Naïve as she was, she thought she would be able of keeping separate what JB is from what they have.   
Reality bites.

JB doesn’t stay behind with Sandy for very long. She hears the door opening and closing and her posture stiffens instinctively.

“Are you scared?” he asks, sounding for once more weary than provocative.  
“No”  
Is it the truth? Should she even being here if it wasn’t?  
He sighs and sits beside her.

“You knew I was an asshole from the beginning. That’s what I am, this is what I do. Did you think I would change? That your holy presence would fix me? ”

Sentence by sentence, he changes from distant to mocking to accusatory.

“No- she answers on a first impulse, just to defend herself by that unfair verbal assault-Yes. I don’t know. Maybe I wanted forgetting about it”  
She has always perceived the presence of a dark, violent core in her wild-tempered lover, a deeper origin to the simmering undercurrent of bitterness pervading him; simply she has refused considering it might change her feelings. 

“Well- he shrugs, contrite-Like I’ve said, this is me”

“But why? This is what I don’t understand: you are handsome and so talented and you could sweet-talk an Eskimo around buying a fridge. How did you get yourself to this point? You could have so much more-”  
“Oh please- he interrupts her brusquely- all the world is a stage, sweetheart we all have our role to play. Yours is Rapulzel, mine is the Villain. I grew into it. I’m the Alfred’s son ”  
Tammy cringes as he smacks his forehead soundly, then she sees him going scaringly still.   
“Jon?”

She wants touching him but he’s so volatile when it comes to accepting physical contact outside sex than it’s difficult determining whether how much good it would do.

“Talk me” 

She encourages him, surprised of how much it sounds like a prayer.

“Drop it, okay? I’ve no redeeming little story for you. I won’t make up excuses for who I am. Don’t you like it? Walk away!”

“Why have you always assume the worst about people? I won’t say I wouldn’t some things were different but do you think I would change you? I would never do that! What’s so wrong with me trying to understand you? To know you? You won’t get me to feel guilty about it! ”

Her voice has risen in volume to match his and her vehemence takes him back: it’s the first time she stands up to him so violently. Or perhaps what strikes him most is the her hinted admission.

  
_I wouldn’t never change you._

  
JB gets up on his feet swiftly, unable to comprehend why her acceptance should mean anything to him.   
He feels her following him and when he turns around, leaning in for a kiss, she meets him halfway, her body melting compliantly against his.  
Her taste is something he will forever associate with cream: nauseatingly sweet and yet oddly addictive. He has no difficulty in positioning her against the wall and her responsiveness to his touch placates him, reminding him there’s no enemy to fight inside this room.  
Yet there are times when he would swallow her whole, just to verify he can.

Her tiny hands are in his hair and JB tries to stop- to stop devouring her mouth before his appetite worsens and his temper roughens her up.

“Donne moi ma bete”

  
Tammy whispers absently, breathlessly while she draws him back.  
Funny, JB has no concept of what she has just told, but it sounds just so… dirty than he can’t look into those passion-glazed cerulean eyes and resist the rush of god-like power they give them.  
He loves the effect he has on her, the unshattered image he sees reflected in her silent adoration.  
It doesn’t mean he loves her.  
He doesn’t love her- the thought relaxes him while he unbuttons hurriedly her jeans, all too awareof the wetness of her lips on his temple.

“Turn around”  
He instructs her, the harshness of his murmur is as self-co

ntradicting as the careful firmness of his hands while he pushes her pants down her legs.   
Tammy’s palms are flat on the wall’s cool surface and her arms are tense, balancing her weight as his fury flows in intense strokes from his body into hers.

Other times when they were together, Tammy has tried imagining they were in love: it wasn’t so difficult, because in all his brazen glory he is always been considerate enough to never let her feel used.  
And now, when it couldn’t be clearer how this man is manipulating her body, using it as a outlet tool, she is aware she should feel degraded, reviled, diminished at least. But she doesn’t. 

She finds herself craving, needing the uncomfortable clashing of their half-clothed bodies, his rough grip on her hips, his tongue on her nape, the hardness of his chest against her undulating back. It’s a sensory overload she can express only in pitiful whimpers.

It becomes too much too fast but it’s fine because what is JB if not an excess?  
Climax crushes them both like an apocalyptic wave of magnificent destruction and when it’s over it lingers only a dream-like sense of loss, the heavy and wet panting of her lover in the crook of her neck.  
Then Jonathan pushes himself out and away from her and the white daze of post-orgasmic stupor fades into a violent tide of self-consciousness and shame.  
Feeling suddenly like if she’s tenfold more exposed to his gaze than if she was actually naked, Tammy pulls her jeans and underwear up, her eyes darting around for an escape route as her fingers fight with her pants’ fly.  
“I’ll shower” she stammers and it’s agony controlling her weak legs enough to not run toward the bathroom.  
What will she do if he stops her?   
But Jonathan, maybe,has already forgotten her, because he doesn’t even acknowledges her leaving.  
-  
Showering, the water is first too hot and later too cold but her awareness of JB can’t be washed away, it doesn’t matter how much she scrubs her legs and arms. He clings to her skin, permeates the air around her. She can feel everywhere: his rapacious touch, his smell, his bodily warmth… the ghost of his taste. He hasn’t kissed her today, yet.

The small bathroom is adjoining the bedroom, so when Tammy steps beyond the threshold the first thing she sees is the Jonathan’s hung figure: he sits on the large, eternally unmade double bed, keeping his chin between his hands. He glances up and their eyes meet, but Tammy can’t define what she feels: her brain is dead, her memory silent.

“Don’t try to save me from myself”  
He says sternly and for some reason, Tammy thinks he might mean just the opposite.  
So she takes her place at his side and the next thing she knows…he has a towel in his hand and he’s drying her dripping hair with a deliberate gentleness. Leaning back into his touch, Tammy grins and enjoys the tremulous squeeze around her heart.

How many more times can she fall? With each one, she loses another fragment of herself to him and someday she fears there’ll be nothing left.  
What is which really draws her to Jonathan Spencer, his starry sky or his stormy night?


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter 12: Confessional**

It’s a warm Sunday morning.   
Tammy opens the window to let the breeze to refresh the staleness of the JB’ s bedroom, noting indolently how high in the sky the sun already is: they must have overslept…again.

Wearing only one of the JB’s old T-shirts she walks in kitchen and leans on the threshold, inhaling the teasing aroma of coffee and enjoying the sight of a bare-chested boyfriend intent to prepare pancakes.

“You know, I’m beginning to feel like if all what we do is sleeping, eating and having our perverse way with each other.”

She comments lazily as he turns, his focus solely on the high pile of pancakes he’s about placing very carefully on the table, just between the cranberry jam and the toasted bread. If there’s something Tammy has learnt by now, is that the JB’ s breakfasts must be long and abundant enough to become lunches, or he’ll get moody until someone pays.

“I’m an healthy, hetero male in his twenties. My priorities are supposed to be fucking, eating and lazing around. What’s your excuse? ” 

Still a victim of post-awakening lethargy, Tammy shrugs and drops on her seat, refusing to comprehend how some people manage to be flippant from their first waking hour to last. They have breakfast as the radio rambles on the background. Tammy is sipping her glass of orange juice and smirking at the Jonathan’s second cup of coffee and sixth pancake when she notices his sketchbook is laying mistreated and forgotten on the chair beside hers, paper sheets half-sliding out, their angles crumpled.  
Intrigued, she takes it and puts it on her knees, prying betweens its pages.   
Jonathan sketches often on his bed, but Tammy usually chooses to not disturb him with her curiosity, instead allowing the sound of his pencil brushing the paper to lull her into sleep.  
All his sketches represent a man in his forties with a dark goatee: his pose and expression change again and again, page after page, but something haunting and hostile remains. 

“That’s my dad, Alfred”

Tammy exercises a remarkable self-control to not glance up, alerted by the casual quality of his voice, but her interest is piqued: JB never talks about his family, unless he’s mentioning his parents in passing and in spite . She can number the things she knows about Alfred and Marissa: their names, the fact his father is death and his mother has remarried. 

“Why did you hate him?”

Jonathan shrugs, his tone bored as he replies: “He wasn’t even my real father, just some bastard who happened to raise me. See this?”

He is indicating a small circular scar on the side of his wrist, usually hidden by a watch, while he leans in and explains almost proudly, if not bemusedly: “I was fourteen years old and it was my first cigarette, I remember like if it was yesterday- he drops his tone a notch or two, in dramatic flair-I was smoking all alone in my room and bam! My dad breaks in and bursts me.”  
“So?”  
“So, he gets all upset over my supposed laziness and he confiscates my cigarette, plus whole the packet ”  
“You refused to surrender, I bet”  
“Nah, I was a good boy and obeyed. He took a drag and politely asked for my wrist, so he could turn the cig properly ”  
“It’s not funny”  
Unable to believe he’s truly willing to joke on something like this, Tammy snorts as JB uncaringly applies a generous amount of jam on top of a rich veil of butter and a thin slice of bread.  
“You can bet, he went on the same spot until we finished the packed. After the first three or four times, it hurt like the hell.”

  
He acts so complacent about it than it suddenly occurs her : “You are serious!?” 

“Dead serious. Oh, stop looking at me like if I was the cutest thing from the Eastern Bunny. I’m not the first whose father has a temper ”

Tammy blinks the uncertainty away, whishing for the right words to explain she feels no pity.  
They belong in so different worlds than it’s near to impossible picturing a father- his father especially- unleashing deliberate malice on his son.   
“Did he-”  
“Hit me? Sometimes. But he wasn’t someone who needed raising his hand to cut you off your size. He managed quite well with words only. You should ask my mom: she still can’t speak his name without looking around like if he can actually rise from the shadows of death and jump on her”

“How has he died?”

“Bar fight. Knife in the gut and all that. They never found the one who did.”  
It’s dazzling, the sudden onslaught of information after so much silence. But it’s a relief as well, seeing he’s finally letting her in.  
“Regrets?”  
At her gentle prodding, he just shakes his head: “It’s easy enough guessing. He was involved with gambling, minor drug dealing, that sort of minor illicit business. He was greedy guy. Probably he treaded on the wrong someone’s feet. ”

“But you…why are you doing what he did? And don’t pull that crap about actors, stages and fix masks. ”  
Jonathan smirks at her heating mood, but it’s not the usual biting, aggressive smirk: this one has a broken, sad quality.  
“Oh, but it’s all true. Wear a mask long enough and the mask becomes you. I’m the Alfred’s son: he has set me on this path, he has taught me all what I know. I may hate him but by the end of the day, this is all what I know how to be”  
“So you are fine with it?”  
“Absolutely”

Tammy opens her mouth to reason with him but then she closes it abruptly. She isn’t so different from him after all: hasn’t she played the good girl so long and so well, convinced nothing would ever hurt her unless she did otherwise, than the Princess became her? At least, she used to be like that before JB came along, showing her the difference between reality and make-believe.  
“Good for you then”

Perhaps, someday, she would have the chance to do for Jonathan what he has done for her. To demonstrate to him that, deep inside him, it survives a core untouched by all the ugliness he has already witnessed.


	14. Chapter 14

**CHAPTER 13: TURNING TIDES**

Jonathan Spencer and Tammy Layne walk side by side along the Yale gardens: his arm is draped around her shoulder and there’s a goofy, self-satisfied grin on his face.

“Care to set a wager upon it?”   
Even his voice while he talks to her is more relaxed.

“ I won’t bet with you anymore, you always cheat!”  
The blonde replies with a definite flirtatious hue, wrapping her arm around his waist.  
“It’s not cheating if you already know I’m manoeuvring according my convenience. No disloyalty, thus no cheating! ”  
The girl pulls away giggling girlishly and then slaps playfully the JB’ s chest.

  
“Ah! This is the most twisted reasoning I ever heard!”  
“Yet, you find yourself won over by my argumentations”  
JB laughs his booming, loud laughter and Tammy Layne fists his shirt and draws him down for a deep kiss.  
Sandy Foster looks away from the scene, disgusted.  
As the dark haired young man turns on his heels and gets lost among the crowd of students, the couple is no more aware of his abrupt departure than of his previous presence. 

“OW! Look where you going, idiot!”

Sandy barely hears the exclamation of the stranger he has just collided with.   
Those images are engraved by fire in his retinas and no escape from them is possible. Jonathan and Tammy. It doesn’t matter how much he tries, no vigorous shaking of his head can erase them. 

Sandy barely hears the exclamation of the stranger he has just collided with.   
Those images are engraved by fire in his retinas and no escape from them is possible. Jonathan and Tammy. It doesn’t matter how much he tries, no vigorous shaking of his head can erase them. 

At 16 year old, Sandy Foster used to be a lanky, bony kid- his father used to comment he looked too pretty to behave like a boy and too quiet or unsure of himself to be smart, his mother simply pretended he wasn’t there during the short pauses between a summer camp and boarding school. Under their unsatisfied gaze Sandy felt himself fading like if he had never existed and maybe staying out of their criticizing-range would be been a blessing, if he wasn’t been an easy target for bullies in any privatized environment he was been placed. His introverted temperament didn’t help. Specially if your father’s paranoia got you confined for whole the summer after your 15th birthday (‘your party has not many guests of your age, son, why?) in a not-so anonymous Camp for straightening homo boys of healthy catholic families. 

In the Swiss Boarding School, it was been worse than ever after that. There was been a boy, Scott Barringer, whose mother was a friend of the Sandy’s mother: everybody knew before the first week of school had ended. 

It was been the hell for moths, until that situation in the gymnasium happened. Five or six boys were taunting him, calling him with names which made Sandy want to hate himself, pushing him on the ground and kicking his stomach and back, carefully avoiding hitting his face so teachers wouldn’t notice, repeating again and again how they wanted him gone. 

“Hey, leave him alone!”   
“Randall? What are you, his boyfriend? ”  
“No, Scotty: I’m the one who will rearrange your face”

Looking up, Sandy had seen Him: longish brown air, tall and wide-shouldered frame, arrogantly attractive face, overtly confident stance. Sandy was been certain Scott and his gang would beat the newcomer in a pulp…until Randall took a swing to Scott and the real action begun, no-it exploded. 

Sandy had never witnessed before such a display of naked, feral violence: JB Randall was pure instinct to destroy and inflict pain set in motion. He dodged punched with the fierce circumspection of a wild, hungry predator. Every detail in him looked perfect, immortal, impossible to forget or ignore. It seemed virtually impossible that someone like JB Randall could walk the same hallways and breath the same air than a regular Sandy Foster.   
Randall broke noses, twisted arms, scared two bullies shitless so than they ran before he could get his hands on them.  
The brawl ended and Sandy was suddenly alone . It took him no longer than five days to know all what was knowledgeable about his saviour, but two weeks passed before he found the courage to speak in the other boy’s presence. 

“I know you have only protected me because you were looking for a good fight and not out of the goodness of you heart, but I… you can rely on me as goon, whenever you want.”

Jonathan liquidated him without a glance : “I don’t need a cheerleader and if I sent you punching people in my stead, they would laugh after me. After crushing you, no doubt.”

  
But all what it took it was persistence, the constant effort to be around JB and to greet him, knowing he would be been ignored in turn. At last, they didn’t become friends, but blood brothers.

Today, JB is still the Sandy’s idol. 

The new girl is changing it all… virginal, untouched Tammy. Sandy can see why JB would want her: she would represent the worthy pinnacle of his long list indiscriminate, promiscuous sexual conquests. What he can’t comprehend is what about her is …sedating Jonathan, turning him in someone who can smile like a child and hold her hand in public. 

  
It couldn’t go on, Sandy wouldn’t let her.

Tammy appears so untouched by the evilness of real world, but nobody can genuinely be so pure and still being attracted to a destructive force of nature. Surely Tammy hides a secret… any closeted skeleton which would turn JB against her.

\---

If your work in the Yale’s gazette Editorial Staff in surprisingly easy to access the archive of Secretariat’s student individual data. SoSandy Foster is, right now, more than a little satisfied to hold in his hands all the possible info on Tammy Layne…no, Tammy Winslow.   
What he has just found out is even better than anything he might have invented on his own. 

Jon would flip. 

\--

Tammy is studying inside the Library, an habit she lately came to neglect. Yet, the background suppressed murmurings of other students at her table, her surroundings themselves are now as unfamiliar as the memory of long hours spent within those walls. Concentrating over written pages is just not so simple anymore.   
“Hello Tammy”  
That familiar voice freezes her always from within, regardless of how many times she hears it.   
“Hello Sandy”  
Her smile is forced, but it hardly stops the young man behind her from occupying a free seat beside hers.  
“I was looking for you”  
“Why?”  
“I wanted to show you this”

  
He slips a printed document over her opened book and there’s a wide smile on his face which she distrusts- the very same one which has fooled her the first time they met. Her eyes slid instinctively over the document, hiding from his attentive gaze.

  
Tamara Winslow- she reads and her brain registers nothings else.   
“How?”

“Does it matter? You are lying to JB”

His condescending tone is annoying like his sense of superiority. Like if he could be in any position to judge.   
“It’s between me and him. It doesn’t concern _you._ ”  
She bites back frostily.

“He is my best friend and you are his cousin. You should be gratef- ”  
“You are sick!”

Her involuntary rising of voice gains her few disgusted looks from more than one table, but Tammy just glares to Sandy, trying to convey all the disgust she feels for his lies. 

“Jonathan’s adoptive parents are Alfred Randall and Marissa Spencer, his biological mother Reva Lewis has abandoned him when he was very young. His biological father was the late Richard Winslow. But you know this story already, don’t you? His majesty has adopted you. I bet JB ignores it all because I can’t honestly imagine-”

She can’t bear to listen more from his pompous, know-it-all voice: “No. Don’t-”

But he interrupts her again, adamantly.

“If you care about him at all, don’t tell him anything. I’ve seen him so serene since you entered in his life and he hates his birth family as hell. He blames them for his childhood more than he blames Alfred. Knowing you are part of them…it wouldn’t be pretty, not only for him, but also for you. It’s not any fault of his, but when JB gets angry, he doesn’t think so well.”

“You are making it all up”

Tammy snaps her book shut, then she gets up abruptly, shutting Sandy out of her mind and hearing. 

If he calls her back while she runs out of the building faster than her legs can carry her, her senses don’t register it.


	15. author note

As, i have written, this is a old fanfiction of 2007, and yet ...

Re-reading it after so long time actually made me to want to add a few chapters to wrap it up, especially as i left it at a pretty dramatic point.

Is it strange, i even remember a little of the plans i had for it?

Probably, but as writer i do feel the pull of those old strings calling me to play. I would like to give Jammy an happy ending, somewhere, and I find in retrospective i quite enjoy the set up i had created here, nd there are things, new things, that I might do with Jammy to bring them to a happy, bright resolution of this dark storyline.

I admit tough I am a different kind of writer than i was back to when I started writing this. Smut is no longer truly my thing, and so if i continue this … it will be inevitably a bit different. More romantic, maybe. Less violence and more healing.

And I have no idea if there will be someone left to read after so long time the show ended but… i might write that Happy ending all the same, just for me.


	16. Shock to the System

**Chapter 14: Shock to the System**

It's a white, hot fever clouding his mind as fog, thick and senseless, making his thoughts sluggish in the face of that furnace burning in his heart, not quite sorrow, not quite rage, but something in between.

His hands are around Sandy's neck, squeezing.  
His eyes are on the other's boy face, features twisted in something ugly, not quite seeing him, all the same.  
His eyes are still frozen in memory, on those papers Sandy gave him, not at all managing to contain his own giddiness over the news he was to deliver.

Tammy Layne Winslow: legal stranger, virtual cousin, honorary princess of San Cristobal, niece to the woman he hates worst and most viciously.

He should be feeling like a fool, he should be already thinking of ways to tear her to pieces, to use this meaningless chip as a key to the grand destruction of Reva Shayne.

  
He should …

  
But his mind can't quite catch up to it. It doesn't make sense to him, for Tammy Layne, his bedroom angel and favorite guilty pleasure , to be part of … _them_ . Because Tam-Tam is part of _him,_ a part that grew on him as a tumour, devoring fast and delirious. A part he doesn't properly understand how or why he has allowed himself to acquire, but that resists stubbornly eradication, always sprouting back when he tries to divert his attention from her too long.

And a part that made him to feel nearly… content, warm, like the she could filter in and fill all the empty spaces in the blank desert of his soul. Sunlight pouring in a cold, inhabited room, painting grey walls Yellow and cream.

He used to think, _'I am going to ruin her if I let her to stay_ ' , and then to know he was just too much of a selfish person to let her slip away before he absolutely had to. Now he feels in all of himself Reva fucking Shayne got there first.

Reva Fucking Shayne took away that one clean thing he was holding in his hands. 

  
Reva fucking Shayne took Tammy Layne, and made her Tammy Layne Winslow.

He drops Sandy, watches this pathethic waste of a person falling on the floor of his apartment and coughing, the red imprint of his hands still there on his neck.   
He thinks with several churning, boiling degrees of disgust that he made excuses for this person, who took advantage of Tammy, and who tried to ruin her before and now, only because he did not want the burden of caring, of admitting he could, maybe , have it in himself to want something pure and good protected and safe.

  
He kicks Sandy in the stomach with violence, looks down with a sort of detached satisfaction as he covers his face with his hands and whimpers.

  
_Nothing but worthless, cowardly weakling desperate to live my life by proxy._

"Next time I see you around, messing in my business in any way, no matter the intention or excuse, I swear, no I promise you, it's going to be last and most painful day of your miserable existence."

Sandy is trembling and sputtering, maybe trying to say something, and it's very nearly enough for Jonathan to feel tempted to unleash on him all the hatred he has inside at that moment -toward himself, his life, the fucking world, Reva, Sandy himself- on that pathethic mess before his eyes.

He should have guessed things were too good to last, right?

  
That was not his life.

  
He is not the guy with someone who cares at his side. Not the boy who gets looked at and listened at like what he says and is are enough to hold somebody's attention for real reasons.

  
He is not the guy with something to protect and cherish.

  
He loves nobody and nobody loves him - that is true story, his true destiny.

It used to make him free. 

Now it just pins him down and stifles the breath out of him, one more prison where all things he will never have and will never be go to die.


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter 15: Blue Days**

Tammy's days are all a muted blue-grey lately. 

She is adrift in the routine of who she was Before - studying, classes, a few friendly faces to meet with friendly, bland energy. She dives in, every day, and tries to not think she cannot imagine this is all there's to life now.

Bland, empty, colorless. 

How could one person presence or absence to make such difference?

She tries to not think of Jonathan at all, because ignoring each other is what they do now. At least, this is what she imagines.   
She has not… sought him out since her last encounter with Sandy Foster.   
At first, it was because she wanted to prove, even to her own mind, that the other boy was liar, that he had forged documents or whatever else to hurt her, that he had made up stories to keep that sort of twisted relationship he imagines he has with Jonathan.  
Then she remebered Reva, her efforts to track her lost child, years ago, and reach out. Efforts met with Olivia Spencer stepping in to dissuade her she had to respect that her sister Marissa and her family wanted no interference from their quarter. 

_Olivia Spencer, Marissa Spencer, Jonathan Spencer. Of course._

It's not quite so difficult to find a connection, after all, nor so unbelievable.

She knew Jonathan's mother was a Marissa, from the name that flashed on his cellphone once or two when they were together. 

Olivia's Marissa was married to an Alfred too, and Jon's sad excuse for a father was an Alfred. 

It's enough coincidences piling up for their relation to be… possible. 

Sandy will have told him by now. That big, ugly thing she cannot bear to think of. She wants to ask Jonathan if truly he did not know or suspect, but then she remembers that however unlikely it might to seem, she went into this relationship completely unaware too. 

How does it happen?

She cannot seem to summon the mental energy to contemplate that they are truly cousins, maybe. 

What is she supposed to do with that truth?

In normal circumstances her family would be overjoyed to learn she managed to accidentally find her lost cousin - Aunt Reva would be delighted, her mother moved, Uncle Josh elated on the account that his wife could finally heal that bruise in her heart if anything else, Edmund would be regretful and maybe repentant on the account of wanting to please her mother, and her cousins curious of their missing brother. In these circumstances, it will be at the least hawkward and uncomfortable and shameful for everybody, and not only because JB is not the sort of boy her family would never allow near her without making things extremely difficult for him.

No, they will be ashamed and JB will hate them and wont rest until they hate him thrice as hard. It's his nature.   
She also holds no naive illusion that she will be able to hide what JB and her have been to each other before, once the cat is out of the bag - because it will get there eventually, she has a feeling. Tammy is certain he will use their relationship to slap in face anyone who would be offended by it.

She might try to cut all contact with him, definitively - is it not what she is doing now?- this way nobody would know, maybe. She might never tell she met Jonathan Randall and that his adoption did not turn the way Aunt Reva hoped, all those years ago. That her lost cousin was never safe, never happy, never supported the way he might have been if Aunt Reva had kept him with her, despite all threats. 

It's a distasteful thought, to keep that lie only because she is afraid of facing the music.

And it's sad, to think of a life where Jon cannot be anything to her, ever again.   
Yet she cannot imagine going from what they are -were-to be just family.  
She cannot imagine they wont be ever again where they were last sunday - making love in his apartment, waking up into each other arms. Laughing, joking, making funny face pancakes for breakfast.

They had barely started … something, and now it was over, irrimediably so, but only if Sandy's story proved true.

She did not want it to be true, but she could not avoid Jonathan forever.   
She held on the hope he could maybe reach for her first, explain it was all a complicated scam on Sandy's part and they could start over or continue as they were with no concern.

Delusional behavior really, and Tammy is disappointed in her inability to cope better with the situation. This is not who she wants to be. She does not want to be the girl so worried about what other people think of her that she never stops to fully live her life, never has the courage to do what she actually wants to do. 

Is not that what has draw her to JB, in the beginning? His ability to be himself, to cope with it when others did not like or accept him ? She thought him braver for it and … she felt braver and freer too, when she was with him. He made her to feel like she could do anything and to come throughout it on the other side whole. 

It hurts so much to think of it as a thing that belongs to past tense.

It's strange, because she has never thought - she has never allowed herself to think they could have a real, solid future- whether it was because they were too different people , or too raw together, and yet when she thinks of him gone it is a too deep kind of loss to hold in and bear . 

She suddenly wants to believe that she can carry a part of him with her always, some secret treasure in her heart thethering to their oddly domestic sundays and too intense nights.

She might become his family, she thinks, if he allowed her, even if he never wanted even see Reva.  
She might take care of him and make sure he did not completely self destruct as he was prone to.  
She should wish for that, to turn everything she feels into something clean and selfless and platonic. It would be the decent thing to do. She should fight to persuade herself it is not too late for following that path. 

But she does not really wants for that. She does not want to give him up, not really, not ever. She hates to imagine the coming of a day where the thought of his skin on hers is not appealing, where his kisses are not heady and his body heat is not the most exciting of all comforts. 

She should be ashamed and disgusted of how she feels, but she is not. 

And that's hard to accept, harder to live with, but not as much as the idea he might not feel the same way, that he might even hate her.


	18. Reclamation

**Chapter 16: Reclamation**

It should not happen the way it does, he is certain. The moment he comes face to face with her at his door he should leave her on the other side of it, and send her on her way with angry words. He should feel all of the impulse to tear into her with poisonous insinuations, to hurt her as much he hurts. He should, really, because he has been so angry with her those days. He has thought of going to her and messing with her head, the way Alfred did mess up with his. He has thought of destroying the family she loves, dreaming of vengeance.

And he stayed away and stewed those fantasies away, hating himself for the images that swam and crowded in his mind. He has thought of that light she has inside, that sometimes makes him to hurt while looking at her - a sweet kind of hurt, a sort made his heart contract and expand out of the sheer impossibility that someone so good wanted him around, and thought him whort something. He has wanted to protect that light, staying away, certain that as soon as he saw her again he would have proved himself unable to try and succeeed in exstinguishing it forever, and just as certain he would have not been capable to stay away indefinitely.

He has thought of her pushing him away too, of becoming to her some dirty secret whose stain she would be desperate to wash away, and raged and wanted retribution for those imaginary wrongs too.

He did not want to see her becoming one of them for good, one of the people he hated and loathed and wanted to hurt. If she reacts like that, he is sure nothing will stop from going to Springfield and devote all of himself, for whatever longit takes, to destroy anything she has ever loved.

He should have sent her away, spared both of them the pain to come, because it was, all of it, unavoidable. 

Instead he he stepped aside and let her in, and felt again in his bones that impulse to protect her from himself.

"Sandy came to me claiming we are cousins."  
She says like she asking, those big blue eyes frantic in worry as they rake over his face, looking for clues. 

He nods, reaching out for a bravado that wont come to him, no matter how much he wills it to.   
"Yeah. It looks like it might be true."

"Wow, that's …."

She lowers her gaze and casts it to the side, away from him, biting her lips anxiously.

He feels like she is slipping away already, out of his reach. 

His hands reach for hers, like if by their volition. "Let's not make it something more than biology. Your family is not my family , it has not been since Reva gave me away. I have never wanted anything from them since the moment I knew I was adopted. We did not grow together. Even genetically we are only half something. It barely signifies anything. It does not need to change anything. "

He delivers it so smoothly, he is surprised by hiw own confidence. Everything has changed, and he stands there, lying to her, bracing himself for the moment she will tell the truth and cut forever this chord that stubbornly joins them. 

He is waiting for it, actually, preparing for the moment he will have once more nothing else than rage to sustain him. Then he will be able to move on planning his vengeance without this weight on his chest at the idea of hurting her in the process.

He is not expecting what truly happens.

Her hands squeezing his hands, her eyes meeting his eyes again, burning like embers with some strange convinction.

"I don't want it to be over, what we have."

Her words stir a whole new, wild feeling burning in his veins - an ache, a fever, a nearly delirious elation.

"Let's not end it, then."

She is leaning in and kissing him, next thing he knows, and something different than they had before. Sweet and slow, but burning like a brand, a most gentle reclaiming of the understanding between them.

She has him and he has her and they fit as perfectly together as they bodies do, altough there are far too many reasons it should not be that way. 


	19. Chapter 19

**CHAPTER 17: SUMMERTIME**

Tammy does not head back to Springfield that summer. She lets Jonathan to rope her in a trekking adventure with some of his old boarding school mates and their girlfriends, mostly because apparently he does this thing every year, and every year he brings a different 'companion', and she learns she is a bit of a jealous beast about it.

Ireland is beautiful tough, and the company is different from what she expected - a mingling of spoiled trust fund babies with either a massive chip on their shoulder or an edonistic, escapist streak, noble born girls more conservative than Tammy herself and promiscuous IT girls with sharp theeth and sharper tongues. JB seems to have histories with everyone strangely, but nobody brings up his drug dealing or his less pleasant precedents. There's a bunch of stories his friends are just dying to tell about him all the same, and a buch of stories he can tell on each of them back …. it's, listening at both sides, very apparent that those people sort of raised each other while their families were otherwise engaged . 

Tammy cannot imagine it, for all her experience with the foster system - her mother has always wanted her, for all her faults, and her family is far too interfering in her affair for her liking. 

  
Kids dropped in boarding schools for most of lives, with all material comforts and none of the love, shut away and forgotten, are like a new species of creatures jaded and immature at the same time. 

But they accept her as she accepts them, and overall she has a more pleasant time of it than she usually has hanging out with the Charmichael sisters.

It's supposed to be a two weeks break only, but she is not surprised when he manages to persuade the whole group to rent a summer beach house in next, and it turns on a whole month, edonistic retreat.

She does not kid herself that it is not for the benefit of keeping her away from home, but she lets it be for now.   
The rage in Jonathan is like a snake coiled and sleeping, but dreaming of the fatal blow to deliver to imaginary prey: she is wary of it, even while she perceives herself safe from its poison. 

Mostly she is not sure it's quite the time to do something about the way he feels about their family. Their relationship is yet young and tentative, something that bridges over the intensity of their sexual chemistry to reach a different kind of intimacy. 

They are just learning to know each other outside the bedroom, and spending summer together, unthethered by the flow of what is their life on the campus is an heady experience where they discover every day more of a common ground.

Bringing out the ghosts of their mothers to play would just ruin everything, and she is glad to spare them that.

For now.


End file.
